Abstract
This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers. The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants. The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc. This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH. In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision. We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.
Highlights
Back in 1999, publishers wanted a neutral party to enable the exchange of links between article reference lists, to avoid having to make numerous bilateral agreements with competitors
Crossref allows its members to register the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of their publications
Some other content types have obligations, too; for example, all preprints need to link to a resulting journal article when they are alerted by Crossref that one exists
Summary
Back in 1999, publishers wanted a neutral party to enable the exchange of links between article reference lists, to avoid having to make numerous bilateral agreements with competitors. Other investments are made in community education around best practice, helping our members meet their obligations, and the distribution of metadata through tools and APIs. In 2006, we released Cited-by, which gives the ability for members to retrieve counts of citations to their published works. This stage until 2017, when a number of things changed: (a) The board voted to “remove caseby-case opt-outs for metadata distribution,” (b) a clearer choice was provided for members for their references to be “open,” “limited,” or “closed” to metadata distribution channels, and (c) the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was born, drawing a great deal of attention to Crossref citation metadata. Crossref members see their membership as a way to distribute metadata—including citation metadata—to the growing number of toolmakers around the world that are trying to make research a little bit easier to communicate about.
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